Characterization of prefrontal cortex responses to cerebellar nuclei stimulation in vivo

This project investigates the functional connectivity between the cerebellum and the prefrontal cortex. It is known that the cerebellum is indirectly connected to the prefrontal cortex through two main pathways, making synapses in the thalamus and in the ventral tegmental area. In this project, we electrically stimulated the cerebellar dentate nucleus and we recorded single-unit activity in the prelimbic region (PrL) of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This connection has been described recently (Watson et al., 2014), though not still fully investigated. In this project, extracellular recordings of the spiking activity of single-units in the PrL are performed using extracellular electrodes. The cerebellar dentate nucleus is stimulated using a tungsten bipolar electrode delivering 100Hz pulses for 200ms.